Technology Musings
by John McDowall


Thursday, August 15, 2002  

From Blogs to subscription software..


So I was using Radio to publish this Blog but was pretty unhappy with it for several reasons

  • Hard to use - configuration was a major pain
  • Complex user interface
  • Can only publish from one location i.e. cannot publish from any computer

So I have now moved to Blogger and it is way cool - simple to use and configure. Ability to log into the blog interface from any location and
publish away - you would think the people at Userland forgot what the web was for.

In many ways the differences between the two programs illustrate one of the problems with our whole industry - feature creep!
Is it necessary to continually add features to protect and preserve a the revenue stream. I am more likely to pay for a new version of word
that removes features and makes it easier to use. In fact I am moving to Linux for most of my work including desktop applications as I
am really tired of paying Microsoft for new versions of Office. I am not sure if I really want to calculate how often I have paid for Office over the past 15 years, at teh same time I think I have used the same feature set. Are you a better communicator if you use transition effects in PowerPoint or format your word document in innovative ways?

Subscription softwares day has arrived - I am going to pay Blogger a yearly fee to keep using the service to publish this blog and I will be very happy (until they make the interface to complex ...). I pay an annual subscription to keep my Linux machines up to date and I am very happy to do so. On the enterprise front I think SalesForce.com is going to make companies such as
Siebel obsolete in the long term. This is happening because there is a well defined set of features that are required in a Sales application and if you capture them and make it easy to use and deploy why would you do anything else.

So is the next wave of applications updates going to boast of fewer features and ease of use - unfortunately not but the team at OpenOffice and Xandros might think about this as a differentiator....

posted by John McDowall | 4:52 PM
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